The proliferation of Blackberries and similar Smartphones has contributed significantly to the erosion of the Work/Life barrier, and has caused knowledge Workers to assume – erroneously, perhaps, but with conviction – that they must be on call 24×7. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly among my clients: people send and receive emails at all hours, and make a habit of checking their Blackberry every few minutes. Convincing these people to stop this addictive behavior is hopeless: I’ve run an experiment along these lines a few years back with a group of engineers and despite all exhortations to the contrary their behaviors remained the same.
Now we read about a bold move by a company that has decided to take responsibility for this problem. Car maker Volkswagen has interrupted the flow of distracting messages at the source; they’ve disabled the move of email messages to the Blackberry servers 30 minutes after the end of formal work hours, and until 30 minutes before the next workday begins. This will bring about what I like to call a “Technology assisted behavior change”: one that uses a technological component to make it impossible to violate a required behavior.
It’s encouraging to see that Volkswagen values its employees’ Work/Life balance and is willing to take an affirmative step to protect their personal time. In addition to being the right and moral thing to do, it is a smart move as well – employees that can relax after hours with their families will be much more focused and productive at work. It’s a Win/Win, and I hope other companies will take note. The fact that they involved the employees in defining this move is significant and should help this succeed.
Let me know if your own organization would consider this!
I visited a doctor’s office and was surprised when his secretary pulled out a card – a ruled cardboard rectangle – to fill in my data. She had boxes of such patient cards in her office. A natural first reaction would be that this doctor must be pretty old and behind the times…
Then I saw the doctor, and he was neither old nor behind – in fact he not only had a computer on his desk, but after a few minutes he whipped out an iPad, which he seemed very happy with and used with speed and effectiveness to demonstrate some points to me. So I asked him, what’s with the old cards?
The reply is worth noting: scribbling on a card allows him to maintain a personal interaction with his patients. To type, you have to turn away from the patient and immerse yourself in the machine’s user interface; a card is unobtrusive and its usage is much faster and less exclusive of the patient; you can use it facing the patient. On top of which , it is not prone to crashes and outages!
This all made good sense – but unfortunately is not going to last: the doc told me he expects that the medical establishment (HMOs, hospitals, insurers, etc) will soon force all physicians to use their mandated computer tools, and that will be that. Come to think of it, if they took the extra step to port their software to the iPad, which is almost as flat as a card, we may have the best of both worlds!
I was discussing with a college student I’ve been advising whether it was a good or a bad thing that Google makes access to answers so easy. To my surprise, she opined that it’s a bad thing – because people who use Google to answer a question are more likely to forget the answer they find, whereas if they have to think the problem through and discover the answer for themselves they will remember it in the long term.
An interesting insight from a Gen Y. But what struck me as remarkable was the fact that this is not a new argument; I’ve seen it before – in Plato’s dialog Phaedrus (written ca. 370 BC), where Socrates tells an Egyptian legend wherein the god Thoth invents Writing and presents in to the Pharaoh as a gift. This, says Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories and more wisdom. The king replies:
“… this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves … they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing … they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality”. [Source]
Looks like my student was of the same view as Socrates! And she may have a point – some of the methods young people use today to compile class assignments can be disturbing, to say the least. On the other hand, in the hand of a smart and conscientious student Google is a powerful tool indeed, and I think that its shortcomings are handsomely offset by its benefits, notably access to unprecedented quantities of knowledge. Besides, with all respect to Socrates, Writing has been around for millennia and nobody seems to complain…
But as the clincher, I must disclose that I did remember reading somewhere about the Thoth story, but I had to Google it to get the details for this post. Score one for Google!
